A History of the End of the World (13 page)

But the number 666 also means something else and something quite specific to the author of Revelation. John, as we have noted, is engaging in the ancient practice of numerology—that is, the extraction of supposedly secret meanings from the arrangement and manipulation of numbers, a commonplace in biblical and mystical writings. Here, John is suggesting that the number 666 is a cipher that contains the name of the human being whom he denounces as the “beast”: 666 is, quite literally, “the number of his name.” And John suggests that at least some of his readers and hearers have already cracked the code: “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast.”
⁹⁹

In ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the letters of the alphabet were also given numerical values, and thus the letters could be used in the way that we use Arabic numerals today. The most familiar example—and the only one still common in the Western world today—is the use of Roman numerals to indicate a date; for example, this book was first published in 2006—that is, MMVI. To give a simple example of the alphanumeric code that the author of Revelation is using, suppose that “A” can also be used to indicate “1,” “B” to indicate “2,” “C” to indicate “3,” and so on. Thus, the common English word “cab” could be encoded in the number “6,” which is the total of the numerical value of each of its letters.

So when John refers to the “number of the beast,” he means the numerical value of the letters of a name as it is written in Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. The name, it is commonly assumed, belongs to a Roman emperor. The traditional solution to the puzzle that John has planted in Revelation is that 666 is the numerical value of the letters that spell out the name of the first Roman emperor to persecute the Christians, Caesar Nero (37
C.E.
–68
C.E.
). But, as we have noted, the earliest commentators on Revelation insist that the text first appeared during the reign of Domitian (51
C.E.
–96
C.E.
) in the last decade of the first century, nearly thirty years after Nero had taken his own life. For that reason, most scholars agree that any reference to Nero in the number of the Beast is a backward glance into recent history rather than a prophecy of things to come.

No single line of text in Revelation, however, has prompted more conjecture and dissension than “the name of the beast.” Some early manuscripts of Revelation give the number of the Beast as 616 rather than 666, for example, and a few scholars propose that 616 encodes the name of Gaius or Caligula rather than Nero. Then, too, the numerical value of a word depends on the vagaries of its spelling, and the various imperial names and titles are formulated and spelled differently in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Thus, for example, the numerical value of Nero’s name and title in Hebrew can be either 616 or 666, depending on how they are spelled, and that may explain why both numbers appear in the ancient manuscripts of Revelation.

John himself vastly complicates the problem by introducing an eerie but deeply enigmatic prophecy about the Beast that begins with the Great Whore of Babylon riding around on a red beast with “seven heads and ten horns.”
¹⁰⁰
Like the Hebrew prophets who were his role models, John is quick to assure his readers that the whore, the beast, the heads, and the horns are all purely allegorical: “Why marvel?” says his angelic guide. “I will tell you the mystery of the woman, and of the beast with seven heads and ten horns that carries her.” The seven heads, for example, are revealed to symbolize “seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come, and when he comes he must remain only a little while.”
¹⁰¹

The enterprise of identifying the seven Roman emperors who are symbolized by the seven heads is yet another cottage industry among the interpreters of Revelation, both amateur and professional, ancient and modern. Some start counting with Julius Caesar, and others with Augustus; some count all the early Roman emperors, both famous and obscure, while others find themselves forced to pick and choose among them in order to come up with Nero as the emperor who “is.” The emperor-counting game, however, turns out be a dead end when it comes to fixing the identity of the emperor whose number is 666.

Indeed, even when John promises to solve the mysteries in Revelation, he cannot seem to resist the impulse to make them even more mysterious. Moments after the angel begins to explain the symbolism of the seven heads, for example, he offers yet another mind-bending riddle: “The beast you saw,” says the angel, “was, and is not, and is to ascend from the bottomless pit.”
¹⁰²
Some scholars suggest that John is now thinking of the ancient Roman tradition that the slain Nero would one day rise from the dead and return to the throne. Nero
redivivus,
they propose, is “the beast that was, and is not, and yet is,” the arch-villain in whose reign the world will finally come to an end.
¹⁰³

Some expert readers of Revelation, fatigued and frustrated by the effort to crack all the codes and solve all the riddles, dismiss the whole enterprise as nothing more than “arid conjecture.”
¹⁰⁴
The reality is that we do not and cannot know exactly which Roman emperor John has in mind when he speaks of “the beast.” As far as John is concerned, however, it hardly matters. If John makes one thing clear in Revelation, it is that he regards
all
of the Roman emperors—and each one of his many enemies, regardless of rank or citizenship—as equally worthy of fear and loathing.

John conveys the impression that Christians in the seven cities face a terrible choice. They are at risk of forfeiting heaven if they yield to the temptations of Roman paganism, and they are at risk of forfeiting their lives if they remain strictly faithful to Christian beliefs and practices. Indeed, the book of Revelation encourages us to imagine its first readers and hearers as a community of imminent martyrs, each in peril of betrayal, arrest, torture, and execution by Roman authority, and each one willing to face death at the hands of the satanic deputy who sits on the imperial throne of Rome rather than engage in an single act of idolatry.

“Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer,” writes John, passing along the word of God. “Behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”
¹⁰⁵

The point is made in several of the stranger visions that John describes in Revelation. Among the diabolical creatures that he beholds, for example, are those two “beasts,” one rising out of the sea and the other rising out of the land. The first beast is given the power “to make war on the saints,”
¹⁰⁶
by which John means the faithful Christians, and the second beast is empowered “to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain.”
¹⁰⁷
Later, when the Lamb opens the fifth seal of the scroll on which the fate of the world is written, John sees an eerie sight “under the altar” in the celestial temple: “the souls of them that were slain for the word of God”—that is, the Christians who were martyred by the Roman authorities.
¹⁰⁸

Yet, among all the Christians in all of the seven cities of Asia, John identifies only a single flesh-and-blood victim who has apparently been put to death for refusing to submit to the demands of Roman law. “You did not deny my faith,” he writes to the church at Pergamum, quoting the Son of God, “even in the days of Antipas, my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.”
¹⁰⁹
The word that is used to identify the unfortunate Antipas—“witness”—appears in the original Greek text of Revelation as “martys,” the root of the familiar English word
martyr.
¹¹⁰
Antipas, as it turns out, is the one and only martyr in all of Revelation whom we know by name.

The fate of the lone martyr is consistent with what we know about the historical setting of Revelation. Pergamum was, in fact, one of the towns where the Roman governor stopped to hear cases and hand out judgments, and it may have served as his official place of residence toward the end of the first century. And it is true that the death penalty was inflicted on some Christians who took the counsel of preachers and prophets like John and refused to make any gesture of compliance with Roman authority. Indeed, precisely such a scene is described by Pliny the Younger, who was called upon to examine and judge a few suspects who had been denounced as Christians by an informer when he served as governor of Bithynia and Pontus in the early second century.

“The method I have observed towards those who have been denounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians,” writes Pliny to the emperor Trajan. “Those who denied they were or had ever been Christians, who repeated after me an invocation to the Gods, and offered adoration with wine and frankincense to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for that purpose, together with those of the Gods, and who finally cursed Christ—none of which acts it is said, those who are really Christians can be forced into performing—these I thought it proper to discharge; if they confessed it, I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed.”
¹¹¹

“Emperor worship,” as Pliny allows us to see, amounted to nothing more elaborate than spilling some wine, a so-called libation offering, and casting a pinch of incense on the altar fire before an image of the emperor. The ritual was seen less as an affirmation of religious faith than a gesture of civic virtue not unlike the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance in contemporary American classrooms. But the ritual also served as a kind of loyalty test: if a symbolic offering to the emperor was meant to ensure the safety and security of the empire, then any citizen who refused to make the gesture was suspected of disloyalty if not outright treason. And so the crime that a martyr committed in the eyes of Roman law, like the offense for which Jesus of Nazareth was condemned to death, can be understood as a purely political one.

Pliny also makes it clear that only the most zealous Christians were made to suffer the death penalty. Someone who confessed to being a Christian was made to repeat the confession three times—and they were pointedly reminded of the penalty for sticking to their story, an interrogation technique that apparently prompted a great many of the accused to withdraw their confessions of faith. “Others who were named by that informer at first confessed themselves Christians and then denied it,” writes Pliny, referring to the informant who had laid secret charges against the Christians under interrogation. “They all worshipped your statue and the images of the Gods and cursed Christ.”
¹¹²

So it is plausible that Antipas suffered the same fate that Pliny describes. Perhaps he was denounced to the authorities, interrogated by a magistrate, and executed on the order of the Roman governor, just as John seems to suggest. But all the other Christians whose deaths are contemplated in the book of Revelation—the souls whom John glimpses “beneath the altar,” and the 144,000 male virgins whom we are invited to regard as sacrificial offerings to God—appear only in John’s visions of the end-times.

Is it possible, then, that John himself knew only a single Christian martyr?

John insists that Christians must endure a long and bitter ordeal—the Tribulation, as it has come to be called—before they are finally admitted into “a new heaven and a new earth.”
¹¹³
And modern scholars agree that Revelation and the whole apocalyptic tradition are best understood as a way of coping with oppression and persecution by imagining a better world to come: “The theology of the Apocalypse is formulated in the face of persecution, banishment, jail and execution,” according to Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a feminist Bible scholar and advocate of “liberation theology” who is also a leading Catholic commentator on the book of Revelation.
¹¹⁴
If Revelation makes sense at all, it does so only as a verbal balm for the bodies and souls of suffering saints.

“One thing of which we may be certain is that the Apocalypse, unless the product of a perfervid and psychotic imagination,” writes New Testament scholar J. A. T. Robinson, echoing a certain conventional wisdom, “was written out of an intense experience of the Christian suffering at the hands of the imperial authorities, represented by the ‘beast’ of Babylon.”
¹¹⁵

Yet it is
not
a settled fact that the first readers and hearers of Revelation were themselves the victims of imprisonment, torture, and death. John himself appears to live in a pagan world in which it was all too easy for a Christian to make his or her peace with Roman authority. Indeed, John would have been far happier if it had been otherwise; clearly, he prefers dead martyrs to faithless Christians who are willing to compromise with Roman authority in order to live the good life. Only in John’s visions of the end-times, and
not
in the historical record, do we find the worst excesses of Roman persecution. Or, to put it rather more charitably, the book of Revelation “expresses the author’s
expectation
of persecution,” as Adela Yarbro Collins explains, rather than his
experience
of persecution.
¹¹⁶

A Christian tradition dating back to the fifth century counts ten periods of persecutions by pagan Rome, starting with Nero, “the archetypal persecutor,” in the first century and ending with the Great Persecution of Diocletian in the fourth century.
¹¹⁷
To judge from the martyrologies that were composed in the Middle Ages, throwing a Christian to the lions was the kindest and gentlest of the atrocities. And yet, by 1776, Edward Gibbon was already expressing a new frankness on the subject of Christian martyrdom: he counts only two thousand or so victims during the so-called Great Persecution; he insists that many of the martyrs actively and eagerly sought the opportunity to die for their faith; and he questions whether their deaths were, in fact, the occasion for the scenes of Grand Guignol that we find in the martyrologies.